Representing Harmony: Goals and Challenges

DCML Workshop 2022 (13-16 September)

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Harmony is an essential component of Western music at least since the middle ages up to the present day. In recent decades, musicologists have engaged more and more with computational methods and created machine-readable datasets in order to study harmony on a larger scale. While the field has witnessed substantial progress in the refinement of analytical methods and tools, it faces several theoretical and practical obstacles due to the absence of widely agreed-upon standards for representing harmony symbolically. This can be attributed both to conceptual differences in the relevance and interpretation of certain harmonic features, as well as to communication issues between researchers from different institutional and disciplinary backgrounds. On the other hand, an awareness is continuously growing that developing and maintaining such standards would be highly beneficial for the entire research community, and would facilitate many practical applications, such as combining datasets by different creators, thus removing pre-processing workload, or to enable training machine-learning algorithms with more data.

The workshop “Representing Harmony: Goals and Challenges” addresses these issues by assembling an international group of experts in  computational music analysis to initiate an intra- and interdisciplinary dialogue in order to foster future collaborations towards this ambitious goal.

Financial support for this workshop is provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation within the project Distant Listening

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(The voucher will buy you 1 starter (if available) + 1 main + 1 dessert (if available) + 1 drink, except for the vegetarian buffet where it’s simply worth 20,- CHF)

  • Claire Arthur – Georgia Institute of Technology
  • David Baker – Universiteit van Amsterdam
  • John Ashley Burgoyne – Universiteit van Amsterdam 
  • Gabriele Cecchetti – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • Johanna Devaney – CUNY Brooklyn College
  • Christoph Finkensiep – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • Klaus Frieler – MPI for Empirical Aesthetics 
  • Mathieu Giraud – Université de Lille 
  • Mark Gotham – Technische Universität Dortmund
  • Ana Llorens – Universidad Complutense Madrid
  • Anna Matuszewska – Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe
  • Nestor Nápolez López – McGill University
  • Yannis Rammos – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • David Sears – Texas Tech University
  • Dmitri Tymoczko – Princeton University
  13 Sep
14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep
9-12 Welcome Ensembles Ensembles Finalization
12-14 Lunch Lunch Lunch Lunch
14-17 Planning Tutti Tutti Exhibition + Apéro
  Social Dinner
Concert Workshop dinner  

Agenda items written in italic are suggestions and not officially part of the workshop program.